The people of Madagascar have a proverb that goes like this: "All who live under the sun are plaited together like one big mat." Which is more than a cozy bit of folklore.

For this enormous island - the fourth largest in the world - with its 18 tribes united at the end of the 18th century under King Andrianampoinimerina, has somehow plaited itself into a most intricate cultural mat off the east coast of Africa.Like the embroidery I bought in the market of the hilly capital of Antananarivo, it was Africa, Asia and Europe, all in one image. The cool upland town of Antsirabe is a three-hour drive south of Antananarivo and is famed for its thermal springs. These appealed to the French in their colonizing days (independence came in 1960), while nearby Lake Andraikiba was a favorite of the Malagasy royals who removed the court there for holidays.

Later, the French would arrive by train to enjoy their tropical Vichy, laying out boulevards lined with jacaranda and lime trees, and leaving Norwegian missionaries to put up chalets with shutters and hedges.

From the railway station, it is a short ride - by pousse-pousse, the Malagasy version of the rickshaw (imported by the Chinese who built the railways) - to the now almost deserted Hotel des Thermes (resembling a French railway station) which overlooks the hot-spring thermal baths themselves.

The state-run baths (evidence of Madagascar's brief engagement with the eastern bloc is also evident close by at the Kim Il Sung library) have perhaps seen better days, but the staff take their work seriously, caring for a stream of local ladies in plastic bath caps undergoing treatment, while schoolchildren splash in Madagascar's only public swimming pool.

To discuss my thermal needs was Dr. H Raveloarison, a worried-looking man in a white jacket, sitting behind a desk in his consulting room. He wrote out a prescription for a "douche ...a percussion" and a massage. The bill was about 25 cents for his consultation and the same for each of the treatments.

The douche was like being hosed down by the fire brigade in a tiled cell; the massage was a scrub by two efficient washerwomen. But for those who reckon the bill too expensive, the nearby Springs of Betato do a special on public holidays - 2 cents for a day-long wallow in hot water on a hillside overlooking the rice fields.

All around Antsirabe is Madagascar's rice granary. Like a Breughel landscape out of Africa, it was filled with bustling farmers working the land: in a courtyard, wheat was being threshed on a stone slab and rice winnowed; by the roadside, lined with apple and peach trees in blossom, women carried baskets on their heads and men pushed barrows of vegetables; and in the fields, figures dotted across terraced slopes planted out rice seedlings or scythed patches of wheat to be bundled by hand into stooks, while children watched over cattle.

All was busy, hey-nonny-no medieval, though these peasant farmers were dark-skinned, straight-haired and wore straw hats, woven shawls and woolen jackets, like Andean Indians.

It is said that the Malagasy eat more rice than any other peoples in the world. Those who can afford it (and there is much poverty), eat it at every meal. Rice is a barometer of economic health, but most importantly, it is the link between the living and the dead, and for the Malagasy, respect for ancestors is everything.

It was probably King A's ancestors who first brought rice to Madagascar from southeast Asia. These peoples came perhaps 1,500 years ago - no one knows for certain - on undocumented journeys, bringing, along with their rice plants, their language and house-building skills to settle in the "center", the great highland plateau of Madagascar that sweeps up and down and from side to side of this great island.

There, at the center, they established a royal dynasty and political institutions. In startling contrast to the green of the ubiquitous rice fields is the brick-red soil laid bare by generations of rice-planting. The red lands seem to go on forever, relieved only by stands of eucalpytus.

This is a chronic situation, for Madagascar is the stuff of dreams for naturalists. At the same time, with 80 percent of its forest gone, the island is "one of the world's most threatened biodiversity hotspots."

The first Europeans to visit Madagascar were fulsome in praise of its flora and fauna. "Here nature seems to have created a special sanctuary whither she seems to have withdrawn to experiment with designs different from any she has used elsewhere. At every step, one finds more remarkable and marvelous forms of life," wrote Joseph-Philibert Commerson in the 18th century.

What is extraordinary about Madagascar's environment is that 80 percent or so of its animal and plant life is endemic. For a start, it has two-thirds of the world's chameleons, 2,000 species of orchid, the weird baobab tree and the "spiny forest."

But, of the trickle of tourists who come to Madagascar, most will go because of the 29 remaining species of lemur. One of the most accessible of the growing number of nature reserves for lemurs (among other creatures) is at Berenty. Tourists get there, usually by air, via Fort Dauphin, a coastal port far to the south. Despite its grand name, Fort Dauphin feels like the end of the world. The town lies high up on a peninsula where the gale slaps off the Indian Ocean, flicking white slices out of a raging blue sea. Sheets of brown sand swirl across unmade roads, stinging bodies and eyes.

Most visitors to Fort Dauphin will lodge at one of the three smartest hotels in town owned by the De Haulme brothers, Fort Dauphin's feudal overlords. Investing their profits from Reunion's tobacco plantations to grow sisal in the hot, sandy countryside around the town, they are also now celebrated as conservationists, for they established Berenty as a study and tourism center.

Berenty is an oasis, edged by a sisal plantation and a river, in the midst of the extraordinary dry "spiny forest": a great gray-green African vista of didiereaceae, a kind of cactus resembling giant cucumbers and broccoli.

The most numerous and least timid of its lemurs are the ring-tails. They live in troops of up to 30 animals, coming down from the trees to sit along the trails, either cat-like, with their wooly, banded tails spread out behind them, or upright, their bellies turned towards the sun. On the road back to Fort Dauphin, blue-gray mountains on the horizon were made even hazier by smoke from ever more burning forest.

Beside the road, the charcoal-burners live alongside the gray-black piles which are their livelihood. In the fields, young boys chase hump-backed zebu cattle around watery rice fields to churn up the bottom before planting. The zebu, in this instance replacing the plow, are usually kept for ceremonial occasions, and represent status and wealth.

Zebus, like rice, are links with the ancestors, and their horns adorn tombs and funerary sites. In this southern part of Madagascar, there are commemorative obelisks close to the road. Look but do not approach. One set, near the town of Marambara, are made of concrete, the pointed top representing a zebu horn. Others are in wood and feature images of the dead person: a woman with a Bible shows one way in which both Christianity and ancestor devotion co-exist.

Most vazaha (foreigners) can only know Malagasy culture second-hand. They will probably never get to attend a famsadihana - the turning of the dead, when the bones of ancestors are removed and wrapped in a new shroud before being taken around the village to assure the people that all is well.

Yet it is not hard to grasp that the ancestors are present everywhere. Even, sometimes, on public transport. When the bones are moved on the luggage racks of buses, the wheels are sprinkled with rum as an offering and the national flag flutters from the roof. By the roadside in the tough, almost rainless south, little stalls sell custard apple, jelly coconut and honey in Coke bottles.

Perhaps they still keep their bees the way their ancestors did, as described by an English seaman called Robert Drury, who, shipwrecked in Madagascar in 1703, spent 15 years there as a slave. Drury also met up with European pirates and slavers, then in full hue and cry off the Malagasy coast. The pirates had made themselves at home far north of Fort Dauphin among the tropical lagoons of the more hospitable Isle St. Mairie. And, by the end of the 18th century, 3,000 of them were holed up in that gentle green spot, where a pirates' cemetery lingers on to tell their tale.

Isle St. Mairie is only just beginning to tempt tourists - young backpackers, adventurous oldies - for walking, cycling and snorkeling along its coral strands. There are a few places to stay, such as the pretty cottages at La Crique, on the west coast. From there, it is a two-hour walk over hillsides graced by the magnificent fans of the traveler's palm (indigenous to Madagascar, of course) to the coastal village of Anafaify. There sits a small restaurant owned by a retired seaman, home after years on cargo boats bound for Europe with vanilla.

The goodwill and openness of the service seemed characteristic of the Malagasy. On the walk to the beach where a pirogue (dug-out canoe) will take us over the lagoon to swim in the Indian Ocean, we pass small wooden homes on squat stilts, where a mother is cutting hair, cloves are drying, and an extended family eat chunks of creamy jackfruit. The breeze picks up scents: here grow pepper, cinnamon, cloves, vanilla.

The expansionist King Andrianampoinimerina described the Malagasy coastlands as "the limits of my rice fields", but his stronghold was back in the center, and at its center was Antananarivo.

Until November, when it was destroyed by fire, the Rova - a collection of royal palaces on a hilltop - was the city's cultural heartland. Here was the original settlement where, in 1610, King Andrianjaka guarded his city kingdom with a thousand warriors. The largest building was the Queen's Palace, the legacy of Madagascar's notorious Queen, Ranavalona I (famous for hurling Christians over the cliffs to the rocks below).

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The Rova displayed idiosyncratic images of 19th-century Malagasy court life when Europe paid a somewhat cynical homage to Madagascar. There were gifts from Napoleon III, a photograph of the ambassadors to Queen Victoria's court, and paintings of the Malagasy royal family in Empire-line frocks or Napoleonic dress.

But much more than that, the Rova contained the tombs of the Malagasy royals. And for that alone, its loss is like Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London being consigned to rubble, as one Malagasy expert put it.

On a more selfish level, it is also a loss for tourists, for the Rova seemed the perfect starting point to understand this extraordinarily complex land, where everything is fascinating, ever so subtly different, and ever so welcoming. And where you can still buy a plaited mat.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

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